New study explores gender bias in academic hiring

When all else is equal between highly qualified candidates for entry-level faculty positions, professors in academic science overwhelmingly prefer women over men, Cornell researchers previously found in national experiments. But would this pro-female bias be strong enough to elevate slightly less impressive women above more accomplished male candidates? In their follow-up study, Cornell social scientists Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams found that women's hiring edge disappeared when pitted against slightly more accomplished men for faculty positions in engineering, economics, psychology and biology. Published as " Women Have Substantial Advantage in STEM Faculty Hiring, Except When Competing Against More Accomplished Men " in the open-access journal Frontiers in Psychology (Oct. 20), the article reveals limits on pro-women hiring attitudes in these cases. The authors note that "faculty apparently view quality as the most important determinant of hiring rankings" when top candidates go head to head. In experiments, Ceci and Williams created hiring scenarios, asking 252 tenured faculty members from a national sample of colleges and universities to choose among three standout finalists for a tenure-track assistant professor position. In one hypothetical situation, faculty evaluated two equally impressive male candidates - rated 9.5 out of 10 on an objective scale based on job talk, , recommendation letters and publication record - and a third woman rated 9.